relationship between president dwight eisenhower and vice president richard nixon. mr. frank reports nixon constantly salles eisenhower's approval while eisenhower was unsure of nixon's ability to assume the presidency. it's about one hour and ten minutes.

it's my pleasure to introduce jeff frank. jeff is an accomplished writer. those of you that by the book today will be blessed in reading the pros just spent 13 years of the "washington post" and i am not sure that is where he learned how to write well but he learned how to get a good story and he was running the out section then he went to the new yorker and was a senior editor for nearly 13 years and that is the place you learn to write well. besides writing nonfiction, jeff has written three or 4i guess works of fiction so someone

understands the importance of narrative and he brought that, for some reason for the relationship between eisenhower and nixon, and i want to begin by asking you why did you choose that particular marriage as the focus? >> because it really was a great story to the year it began with two people that really didn't know each other. one of them a hero and the man was given credit for leading the allies to victory in europe and a 39-year-old orange county congressman. he didn't choose him as vice president. he later was asked by "the new york times" how did it happen the night he was chosen and i had my advisers and there were six or seven people on the list

and nixon was on the list. so they got together and they had a very strange relationship that went on and on during their residencies can closer to what nixon calls his wilderness years and then around 1966, eisenhower's grandson began to date julie nixon and they were crazy about each other. a year later when they were 20, they were married. and they became one family in november of 1968 they had thanksgiving together, mixing and eisenhowers and julie nixon's firstborn was eisenhower and there was a great story. it's rethinking xm.

i'm not sure i have read of them. i do have an epilogue that deals with what came after the presidency that began two months later he was dead and that is where it covers the story that an exclusive men's club in san francisco. >> what sense of the man did you get? >> he baffled me and i found an extremely complicated to be a i was just sort of riveted by the different sides of him. i wish he could be very vindictive and officious even long before the tapes we heard he would refer to the 1960 running mate as a knucklehead

and get she could be so kind to people and so generous in ways he didn't have to beat. he always had to think about the kennedys but when he was president, he invited mrs. kennedy and her children to see them in the white house and it wasn't just a perfunctory look around. he spent time with them and then he had personal letters written back to the two children. they were so touched she held back to nixon and they had that side of him and he just completely baffled me. >> what struck me as hermene dwight eisenhower was to richard nixon. >> it's amazing. eisenhower wasn't even aware of it. he regarded almost everyone that worked for house staff and nixon

was a lieutenant commander of the navy can there again, eisenhower was a five-star general. i try to get a sense of that today. we have four stars like david petraeus but it's a difference between leaving the expeditionary force in normandy were running the surge in iraq. it's a different magnitude and again, eisenhower, jamie roosevelt from fdr's son wanted to run as a democrat and he could run with both parties and then they would have different fais presidents. he was beloved. i was almost oblivious in some ways to his attack on people coming and yet i think they've delivered cruelty and start off in a very bad way. i'm sure you all know the stories of the crisis which

began by a group of millionaires and there was a lot of pressure to get nixon of the ticket. he explained himself to reveal all of his finances and talked about a dog named checkers he wasn't going to give back and define his order to resign. write to the republican national committee basically circumventing eisenhower's right to remove him from the ticket but from that moment on, things were never -- and some ways things are never the same even though they did work together. eisenhower -- he was a scar that never healed and julie nixon said was the anniversary of the checkers speech her father would say to you know what davis is? and he never forgot.

he would try to get them off and 56 and he would do things when nixon was given a vocation in the summer of 58i saw pictures i want you to come back to washington and there was never any rest from them. he wasn't a kind boss. he wanted his own way but it was a casual indifference to the field of other people. >> all of you decided not to watch the state of the union. but somebody in the country, some people are watching the state of the union and we are watching now a dialogue between the research and to be elected president and a divided republican party. you wrote about quite a different republican party.

>> it was a different party. there were -- when nixon and eisenhower was there it was the party of lincoln. >> jackie robinson. >> and martin luther king was a big supporter until they had a bad moment and the eisenhower administration with nixon working in the senate was considered a landmark bill at the time and then there was a liberal wing and a conservative wing so to speak of the conservative wing people like robert taft she had a social

conscience and so on that route lawyers as an invisible u.s. government had taken over the country they didn't speak for the party can and in fact eisenhower was reluctant to take anybody on directly he thought he really did want to get mccarthy exiled from the party that he put xm up to date. >> one of the challenges for somebody writing about richard nixon if you would share this view is that we have an ocean of information about him as president largely because he decided to leave it but he didn't expect the public to have access to it and we don't have as much about him. how easy or hard was it for you to get to mix and when you wrote about him? >> i get a lot of credit to timothy. a lot of stuff was open, and you

can go down there and you can go through the archives and find and the more time you spent with, the more things you would discover. i began to be fascinated by the notes that nixon wrote on the yellow pads that he would write down she was like an a student to get everything he did he would take notes. eisenhower did him the dictator in the fall of 53 of all through asia in vietnam he met the emperor and basically said she saw a future in a way that he didn't like but you could see nixon reflecting and being resentful and when they felt that eisenhower was trying to get rid of them in 1956 he was writing down its the president's choice. he was basically writing his own sort of death speech. he never said it but you could find all these things.

and it's all there but you have to keep looking. the other thing that is so important is there was a barrier between the nixon library run by the national archives and the nixon foundation was a far more celebratory part, and i had to work with them, too and they were terrific. they decided they were going to trust me to be fair to the it and i hope i was fair. they put me in touch with one person in particular who was the assistant to rose mary woods who had been the secretary and marge was basically with them for all that time, too. she was with them when the crisis that we spoke about came into the news and nixon was under great pressure on a train from northern california to oregon, and marge was there and talked about what it was like to meet general eisenhower. so things like that were important from the foundation side, and they were really good come and then the library was

terrific. they were all open and very helpful, they were professional. but i couldn't remember, eight or nine trips to yorba linda i had enough of the olive garden. [laughter] >> there are other places. >> there are. there are to get actually there is a good sandwich shop. >> well, for a solid friend of richard nixon, historians are problematic and you did a very, very good job of navigating and talking to everybody. i noticed in the book a number of folks who would have been interviewed by the library in the first year or two but after awhile decided they didn't really want to talk to us that they talked to you and that is important. i would have to say that

standing back the darker side of richard nixon but we know from the tape do you see hints of that in the 50's or are you among those who believe that there was a change, but this man was actually traumatized? >> i am one of those who believe there was a change. and i don't know where it dates back from that it's probably from the very beginning of his relationship with eisenhower - he was under constant security and it was very much like any employee hired by a sort of a top-level corporation and to know whether his job was safe. it wasn't until the 1956 election when there was nothing to be done accept eisenhower still had a keen needed support if he was going to be running for president, and after his heart attack in 1955 which we

can talk about or not, for the first time people begin to talk about him as an heir to the presidency. this was unusual to the vice president for not considered errors to the presidency. no one thought of garner or even harry truman as the president. roosevelt didn't think of him, he didn't tell him anything. >> he didn't have an office in the white house. but eisenhower did him a great favor of trying to keep them informed the. he attended cabinet meetings and when eisenhower was there he rim them and the same thing with the national security council and eisenhower sent abroad on trips of three shy in 1957 after nixon became very close to the secretary of state john foster dulles and he suggested that they should visit africa with the gulf coast so there were lots of things that eisenhower did to try to get nixon up to speed. i don't want someone is going to

bang a gavel in the senate. >> so because there are people who will argue that it was the experience of losing such a close election to john f. kennedy in 1960 that that was the trauma. you are leading the foundation for arguments. >> no, no, no. >> she was a father figure and he couldn't please his father figure. >> i'm not going to get into the psychoanalysis. everyone else does and -- >> i don't think richard nixon painted himself in the bathroom. >> we were talking about that wonderful line it was in fact freud. but the election was hugely dramatic on all kinds of levels. 1i think nixon who always regarded kennedy has a friend she liked kennedy.

one of the things i found after the nastiest campaign in the race against douglas which the fervor turn against him that shortly after that, he spoke with some kids at harvard and said i'm really glad mrs. douglas lost. so they were friendly. mix and supported his membership application to the country club and they invited the nixon's to the wedding when jack kennedy was laid up with a bad back injury nixon sort of helped the reorganization of the senate but she wrote to him and said you are one of the most wonderful people. so i won't call them friends. they were politicians no one is really friends in this business. >> o'neill and ronald reagan must have been friends. >> but they were friendly colleagues, roughly the same age

and kennedy was playing rough. nothing was called back and he felt he was being roughed up. they were saying terrible things about him, it was a rough campaign and when it was all over people were still arguing about that and don't forget if he had won the illinois and texas she would have won and he always felt he got royal least if in that election. >> there is a renaissance and i caught some of this when i was both at the library because of george w. bush because people were looking back to richard nixon and saying you can have a good government republic at once the government to be efficient and that certainly has to grow all the wonder mixed and it did grow. the republican party is so

different now. there was much more interest in richard nixon's the five domestic agenda. everybody's been interested in the foreign policy side opening to china and the end of the war on vietnam. but in noticed this in the second term of the bush administration there was more interest in the domestic policy. it's a real problem for historians because on the tapes, richard nixon is and always happy about his domestic policy. i was wondering since your back looking at the period for richard nixon, where would you put him in the new deal in the 1950's? would you say he's interested in a continuation of the new deal, has he begun to doubt the new deal? what role does he see them playing in society? >> i think that he had no desire to undo the new deal. he was a congressman very much

in favor of the catastrophic health plan. don't forget when nixon was growing up the family wasn't poor but he had two brothers that died of tuberculosis and wasn't very good health care. one brother was 7-years-old and his older brother died when he was 25. and so. they voted for it and even if he didn't support the environmental protection agency began under nixon she brought in pat moynihan to try to promote this idea of the income tax and even the nixon backed away from at from certain standards were set about the welfare system in the country that you have to give nixon credit for and the philadelphia hiring plant and so on. so, she was a pretty good domestic president.

he worked with him at the the library to get through the first three or four months of the presidency it's like the golden age if you go back and look at it again it's amazing all this stuff was going on and new policies and ideas and if you read some of the new pieces, the road for the nixon watched on some of these meetings to sit around for hours so that was a whole different side of nixon then it stopped. he lost interest. >> that is what makes him such a puzzle. i'm not suggesting you do this but i hope to get over the cold but i was just getting over the cold, and i was watching on c-span some clips from mixing's state of the union address. again i am not suggesting that this is a way of becoming healthy, but i did it and i noticed him talking again about the environment and how proud he

was for his achievement in cleaning the air and cleaning the water and he said it and he was proud of it publicly. they said we've made a mistake we shouldn't do this and if we ever get a choice between jobs and the environment i always go with jobs. don't forget it and fire people that say they should go. it's so hard to understand. on the one hand, she -- what he said publicly in the state of the union address not once but three times when you want and what actually expect bill clinton if not president, to say do you see in the 50's, and that is not war with himself over what he believes?

>> one of the most interesting things the following this thread of nixon in the civil rights and mentioned the trip to africa in 1957 and that's where he met martin luther king who was 28-years-old at the time and nixon they would have gotten along and he's trying to talk to the civil rights administration he wanted to get to eisenhower and they said sure, come see me. they met in washington in the office and they stayed in touch regularly coming and he felt they had correspondence he really admired him and had a good sensitivity. the one black man in the white house was a man named fred morrill and he rode and felt completely sort of alienated. they said fred, i don't think

that you should always be talking about job issues that affect black people. i think that you should -- that just means you and it's baffling. he baffles me in so many ways. but they are always pretty good for those later tapes the job is terrible, and they have so much pressure on them and harry truman for example we know now he would use the n word regularly and johnson did this but harry truman didn't sound so great and to forgive them for it because it's what they do that counts. i give him a little bit past

about the liberals who always want more >> the challenge is convincing and the president sets a tone but it's acting on some of this venting from acting on this anger which is i think when you draw the line between the two. >> to me to be acting on anger is vietnam, getting into the self destruction of the presidency which isn't my subject fortunately. >> if he had been he elected in 1960, historians say they don't like counterfactual. we love them. dinner is conversational. anyway, if he had been elected,

who knows what we had believed to have had a vietnam war? it was probably the most dramatic and we still haven't recovered from. tom did a review but he has this interesting counterfactual sort of digression to say what if eisenhower when he had his stroke in 1957 haven't recovered then eisenhower would have been the first to resign and we would have had nixon. what would he have been like? of course we will never know that he wouldn't have been the traumatized be cannot watergate president that we got. >> i don't think that we would have had the cuban missile crisis because i think nixon who had been supportive of the cuban operation is extended and was in operation and was i don't think

that he would have led the bay of pigs go all the way around, and i also pretty convinced that you can make a strong argument at least that he would have intervened because it had a longstanding interest in china. so i think that the u.s. military intervention in southeast asia would have started in 1961. i can tell you when it all collapsed in about march 61 so he would have had different crisis to deal with coming and the issue i think for students of presidential biography is whatever demons he had in him that come out when he is under pressure because of the vietnam and watergate were they there so that when he would have been under pressure in 1961 they would have come out right then?

>> the american public gets tired of the war and you've got to be able to reveal with some equine semidey. >> i left counterfactual history and the thing you leave out is that eisenhower would have been alive and pretty vigorous in 1960. eisenhower would have -- the human invasion if it had gone forward would have gone for the way an overwhelming force and they would have succeeded. for the same reason he managed to keep us out of any real involvement in indochina. eisenhower did send money over there and helped prop up the regime but whether he would have gone, i don't know. i can't imagine fighting a gradualist war under any one.

>> fortunately we have the history that we have. you think that the kennedy assassination is a major turning point for richard nixon. >> i do. i think the kennedy assassination is the worst that ever happened to richard mix and. he has had a really -- as we talk about a really traumatic loss. he ran against the governor in 1962 under eisenhower another's a terrible mistake. nixon had a long detailed memo that was the argument with nixon you could see the temptation okay, rockefeller's governor comegys the chief rival in 1960 and i could be the governor of the second business steve and everyone said he couldn't lose and he lost. he lost in a big way.

but many people think it wasn't that big of a deal for him. he didn't really care. he didn't want the job, he didn't really care about the water supply. this is the sort of thing -- this wasn't his thing. he wanted to think about the big world issues. and the kids he picked on to his credit he had taken on the john birch society and he's a conservative republican who i think he was a rose bowl hero and his kids are being teased in school by the children. they were glad to get out of here coming and they moved to new york in the spring of 63 for a really good job offer. a perfect job offer. he didn't have to practice much law. he could use speeches and he could be a partner bringing in business as this wall street firm that became i forget all of the names and so on.

but they were happy. they were going to eating a the best restaurants, nixon was having lunch at the recess club with tom dewey and they were walking checkers along fifth avenue. patricia and julie were going to the school in february of 64. they got tickets for julia for the eda sullivan show and suddenly kennedy is killed and nixon started up again. he wanted to run in 64 with.

i'm likely to run again in 1964. i won't run in 68 or 72. and he managed. >> he would have felt it was a normal prosperous. >> he was in dallas. >> he gives a press conference in dallas before the assassination and he criticizes the leadership. he is enjoying walking his dog in new york. >> he spoke at washington and he

was happy to criticize them for the bay of pigs. he was a good republican speaking out against the opposition and he was happy doing that. he had contempt for kennedy. what affect do you think the 60's had on the nixon. it's been a glut marked the start of the 60's for the assassination of john f. kennedy. what do you think the effect for 50,000 troops the entire war demonstrators what effect do you think that has on his understanding of what it means to be a leader. estimate that is the other thing that affected him.

it's never happened before. people were throwing tomatoes and smoke bombs and so on. the pentagon papers the secret history of the war nixon felt threatened by at and was a breach of security and so on and certainly the counterculture he just didn't get. the 68 democratic convention he really didn't have that much contact with the counterculture and his children didn't either. david and hearst was part of it and they made.

>> he did a good job though. >> she was coached on the program he was a real republican and finally ended up by sock it to me. it helped win the election is very close. >> you have a period of domestic turmoil. >> it would be to feel how much of that he brought with him and i'm thinking back to again the story that you lay out so

beautifully in the 1950's. >> the california friends come and i think bob and carol finch were very good friends even though he was pushed when he came to work with him he was sort of pushed out. he was a sort of lonely man in many ways. i think the key to him, the key to the failure as a president is that he was having great power coming enormous power he didn't have before you can see him beginning to exercise it after he is elected these memos this is nixon from the president, and she suggested someone commission a book about the most maligned politician in american history or the great combat in history,

and where is this coming from? and so, you can see this combination of great power and great insecurity. a deadly combination. and i think that is what finally brought him down. >> what struck me one of the things we did at the library is we started an oral history program because the library had been run privately and the federal government had kept all of president xm's papers in washington most of the outcomes of watergate and my job was to bring it together so they started this project 30 years late so it's much better when they get people just out of the administration. it may be more candid. they're really older gentleman that i interviewed for the library had been with richard

nixon in the 50's. and you just mentioned something about him pushing him out. without exception, the men that had been with him in the 50's he pushed away from him when he got the white house. these younger people were willing to do what he wanted them to do. they wanted to keep saying no, don't do this. now what i'm wondering is why what he pushed we the people from the eyes of proper crew that might have been a very healthy and much more influence on him when they become friends.

he talked about it and he resigned before the watergate and he said you know things are changing. these orders would come down. they would come from haldeman and was clearly from nixon. they all cleared out and these were people delivering and at the end was rose mary woods. people who knew nixon and had been with him for years they had been with him since the early years of the vice presidency and rose mary when he was in congress and others and so on and herb klein that had been a stress secretary they were just sort of neutered and pushed away and i think that nixon was free to let loose his worst side. raymond price who was the

editorial at the tribune he was sort of nixon's good speechwriter on the generous side and pat buchanan who came in and worked as a conservative editorial writer on the other side and patrick wrote the speech while nixon's notorious speech, the one that led before the invasion of cambodia. they attended their congratulations after that and. at the end of the presidency it was clearly offended. >> there are people going our of microphones so raise your hand if you have a question and raise

the the koza your first and last name. we are recording is not only for the website but also c-span is here so you will see yourself on national television probably next month. anyone with a question? all the way in the back. >> [inaudible] >> what was taken away from the tape the part that was erased, and i have heard some things that may be watergate some things about the kennedy assassination that's partly why he wanted to break into watergate wynn. >> he has heard many more of the tapes than i have. >> we don't know.

the national archive first of all the courts try to figure out what was on that piece of tape and the analyst at and they determined that was delivered and there were six to eight examples of somebody started erasing it and started and stopped. the national archives i think ten years ago analyzed the tape and used all the offer ends six in trying to find some bits of sound on the edges because when you erase something in those old tapes you couldn't get everything. suddenly there was nothing. and then just recently there was

another attempt to look at and to evaluate it and it was also an attempt to make sense out of all the guinn haldeman. when he met with the president, she would have a yellow legal pad coming and he would know to decisions of action items he would have to do. he did not write transcripts of their conversations. and he did note the nature of their conversation that day. so we know they talked about watergate's. they know that the period is almost exactly covering the period when they were discussing watergate. so if it was accidental. but from the notes, and haldeman

's notes were never designed to be transcripts to discussing how to fight back. that is all we have. so the tape itself that is provided no new clues, haldeman's notes are rather limited and the national archives today spectral analysis to see whether there had been another page that has been wrecked off and thrown away and they were looking for indentations. you are smiling but people to actively try to figure out and nothing. >> is their anything deeply semester beyond what we know. >> well, i tell you what struck me is interesting about that tape is how it had been handled with my job at the national archives i wrote to the new watergate library and i looked

into this. i had run a project analyzing tapes and it turned out that these tapes have gone to come this particular tape which if i'm not mistaken as june 20th, 1970 to to read the first time that haldeman and nixon are talking to each other in the white house after watergate. ..

>> i wish that there were more on the gap. so i was just getting speculations of mine in question on the left? >> hello, my name is brian. i'm not going to ask about conspiracies. americans facing government is a lot lower than 50 years ago. obviously, a lot of things have happened during that timeframe. the vietnam war, the iraq war, vietnam, hurricane katrina, etc. >> vietnam and the assassinations yes. we have the johnson administration that started this. and we had robert mcnamara who was, at that time, very prominent. you had the white house and

pentagon briefing about the situation in the war. then you have other journalists were on the ground. i'm not saying that the public was naïve, but they were used to a certain level of honesty. they were seeing this diversion. that was the gap. the loss of both kennedys, end of martin luther king, it will shock people about the nature of our political system. but i think that it is -- i know it is part of it. vietnam and then you know, look. the president -- president nixon in 1973, he makes a statement. he denies lots of things. a year later, evidence comes out. some of which he provides to the court. which contradicts almost completely what he wrote in 1973. it did not even take a year.

as a citizen, you have to wonder if i was lied to by johnson and mcnamara and now our electoral process and our governments commitment to privacy by president nixon. so both as democrats and republicans, they have lied to me. why should i believe them? >> is their question on the right? >> hello, i was at an event with carl bernstein a year and half ago. they talked -- i think they were very interested in eradicating the list of things that he did. i was just curious about your perspective was. how good of a job he did in making us forget the things he did? >> you know, bill clinton sort of said, there will come a time

when this presidency will be judged by this one thing. he's in the public spotlight for 50 years. there is a broader view of it. the war was his war. he was a cold warrior, and i think it was a great tragedy. >> yes, they were stuck there. but i don't think that -- i mean, i think that he became a valuable counselor in some ways. people were never forget what he did. we will begin to see him for all of his personal quirks. it widened the perspective of this view. >> i disagree slightly. i think there was an effort made

to alter public perception. i do believe that richard nixon had a lot to offer the president on foreign policy. one of the things that i have to say is he believed in the big-play. we call it a hail mary pass. china was the huge risk. so he had a lot to offer. but i do believe, i know this for a fact that it was difficult for the tapes to be available. richard nixon, by the way, he was totally in his right to assume that the tapes belonged to him. because every president until richard nixon on their papers. they didn't know that there were

kennedy tapes until the nixon tapes were released and the kennedy family then told them that, you know that scene in the warehouse? well, the national archives didn't even know. president kennedy, president johnson, they assumed that the tapes that they were making would belong to them. well, when he cut a deal to try to get back the tapes, congress intervened and passed a special law. the nixon library is the only one covered by one law. that law stipulated that members of the public have the right to get an information. president nixon then sued. and it was a long, long

struggle. it took years. only now are the tapes coming out. when i was there, we released about 630 hours. there is important material coming out this year. it has taken years for this stuff to come out. that is because of richard nixon and his estate. so they did not want these tapes come out. the same with the papers. nixon sued the national archives and the drag out. when i was there, there were 35,000 pages that i found in the fall that i got out that had been put in there because they were afraid of what richard nixon and others' reactions would be. it didn't change the world. but the fact of the matter is that he put enormous pressure, both legal and political on the national archives. that drag out this process. i will say one thing, if you

care about access to government information, and work for them anymore, so i can say this -- but support the national archives. it has very little public support. and very little political support. it is really important. richard nixon is not the only one to put pressure. >> i totally agree. i'm talking about the pr campaign in the public eye. and i do want to say that we should really give nixon -- i mean, that is one thing about nixon. henry kissinger was the old european guy. nixon was from the west coast. he traveled to asia when he first took office. this was all nixon.

>> next question. >> this is directed to the both of you. you mentioned nixon's relationship. [inaudible] he served with william dawson and adam howell. he championed nixon during his tenure as vice president and according to an autobiography, he was snubbed in favor of more opportunity as it rose to travel with nixon's administration. that was a consistent pattern. it was very selective. although all three of the congressmen were democrats. obviously, it would've not been the first choice just for that reason. there was a selective policy during the time.

it was limited in a circumstance like that. them saying that we will select one of the three congressmen and then the other ones will be decisively turned away. how do you feel about something like that, how it affects the legacy of a man, one that has a divided relationship and some of the other things that he did? >> eisenhower had no sympathy for the brown v. board of education decision. but something was a crisis like this, eisenhower did not follow the law, but the constitution. and he hated this whole thing. and he thought that this was a sort of demagogue. i'm not sure what nixon's role in affairs.

they actually kind of liked each other. >> the issue was that he was influenced by advisers in order to be able to make a decisive decision not to include him. what i am saying is that you feel as though nixon's personal politics towards african-americans during his administration were negatively affected by advisers that surrounded him during that administration remapped. >> i do not think so. >> i'm talking about president nixon. but i'm talking about what happened during his election. >> i'm not aware of 20 other. i'm sorry. >> i think that richard nixon and his attitude towards african-americans was shaped by some assumptions that he had about genetics and race. which he speaks about them.

i think it is really useful for someone who wants to understand his view of the world and to look at how he thinks about race and how he applies his own kind of genetic status. >> i think his private attitudes -- i think in this case he really supported the aspirations of african americans as much a secret. >> but i also think he assumed certain things. >> if he did, and i think he did -- he never expressed a publicly. >> i think it may have shaped his policy. >> i came to that conclusion

listening to the tapes and seeing some of the correspondence with daniel patrick moynihan. one way of looking at the policies that way. >> okay. >> hello, i'm i am wondering what you discovered about the relationship between richard nixon and ronald reagan during those years? >> there was not much of one. nixon did not have much respect for reagan. he didn't think he was all that bright. i think it's probably more involved in other things. this is one the first george bush was president. and we thought, okay, maybe he's not quite getting this.

and so we thought, let's get him to write a piece for us. let's give it a try. so he wrote a piece, and it was a pretty good one. recall the office the next morning and he was up all night working on it. so i was told that we gave it to president bush and it had an effect on his policy. >> another question over here? >> enqueue. my name is terry stevenson. i have a question during the watergate hearings. when we go to the future and talk about legislation, how much

of what nixon got in trouble for would be legal now? >> well, that's a good question. >> i will tell you what we know about president nixon. which happened not very far from here. the president was told by the chief domestic adviser, a group that was supposed to talk about the plumbers, or had been in operation in los angeles. it was part of what they were doing. they had aborted this. the president was told, and the timing of this call correlates

exactly with the operations here. the president himself was not sure whether he had authorized it. he had asked the action officer whether he had authorized it. later he said that he still thought it was right for national security reasons. he thought there was a conspiracy leaking information. the patriot act does not allow government to break into place without a warrant. the area for the patriot act and some of what richard nixon did overlaps and is a question of wiretapping. this is a time when it was legal wiretap for national security purposes without a warrant. but it had to be for national security purposes.

the debate over which are nixon's wiretapping is did he do this for national security reasons or for political reasons. because the people he were wiretapping were journalists and also people who used to be on the staff. so part of this is a reminder of that era when others could wiretap without warning. as a result -- national security wiretaps of this era, congress and president ford and president carter signed bills, which gave us more privacy. the patriot act undermines some of the privacy that was a post-watergate phenomenon. what looked like we were going back to this time that we didn't really like.

>> one of the things i was trying to talk about in this book was not a focus on watergate. that territory is owned by so many reporters and writers. i thought there were so many interesting things to look at. >> there was no point kicking around that one. >> the one thing that is interesting -- is this the same thing? and the problem is that we have almost everything this man did when he was in the white house from 1971 until july of 1973. imagine her life under that microscope. there is nothing like that for

him as a vice president. so the inner nixon is not accessible with the materials that we have. >> a lot of it is available if you look at the notes that he had. there was a interesting section on eisenhower was trying to get into this 1956. this went on for months and months. richard nixon really thought this would be much better than the whole crisis, and nixon was writing notes to himself on how he would announce that he was going to voluntarily get off the ticket, and it was agonizing. i will do it for the good of the country, he said, it was terribly revealing and tormented by security.

and so you could find all these sorts of notes in the meetings where he presented himself, he gave a talk to the cia discussion the job of a vice president. and you could see the way that he sort of saw himself, a man who was everywhere. he was in the legislature, he was in the executive branch. so very interesting things. but it's in there. and also how many billions of papers. >> they said 42 million papers, but i didn't get out all of that. >> okay, we have time for one last question. happy hour is about to start in the lobby. you can ask our guests anymore questions that you may have. also, our favorite bookstore is joining us. now we will have a last

question. >> hello, i think this is very fascinating. i always thought it was interesting in how the lessons are part of the administration. going through nixon's papers, it seemed the first year that he was already applying in which he was letting politics and foreign policy. i'm curious how you see his relationship with the eisenhower years in terms of the domestic policy and how that informed his politics. you see any of those things being applied in the nixon industry? >> okay, i'm not quite sure but he was definitely in full campaign mode. there was a man who coached him

when he first ran for congress. so he really tried to give a course in election politics. he said you have to deflate your opponent. nixon learned that lesson. the tax side of him wasn't just the bidding, but something that he had learned. he believed in it deeply. i'm not quite sure what you meant with that. >> okay. i guess i would say it seems from the very first month of nixon's presidency that he was already applying domestic policies that could determine his political future. i'm curious if he saw him learning lessons from how eisenhower reacted to things and how to get out ahead of the things.

>> yes, he did what he thought he had to do. but he thought this is what he had to do due to the brown decision. >> there is one lesson that i think you learn, and her book he suggested he may have felt that way at the time. but clearly, later on he came to think that when eisenhower handled this crisis, long story short -- israeli and the french and the british -- now this is a genuine conspiracy. the united states decides not to back great britain and france. it puts pressure on the british to get out of there. in later years, he thought it was a mistake.

but he didn't say anything. >> okay. >> he is certainly very open and he starts talking about it. so he saw this as a mistake that eisenhower had made it. so i think that there were negative lessons he learned from that. >> he also said that eisenhower changed his mind. i never found evidence that he did. he was taking a stand there. >> i will say that richard nixon was very interested in african leaders in the 50s. so by the chinese president is going nowhere. >> one last thing. i think it is the most interesting part of the story.

in the 50s of the decision to change american policy towards china. was that something had learned? >> i think it was a fascination with that part of the world. as i said earlier, growing up on the west coast -- the east really meant a lot to him. i think there was something in him always. it wasn't until later, but that was the first time he went public for it. but i think there was something in this because of his fascination with asia and east. >> yes, not always in a good way, but he always was. >> okay. thank you very much.

[applause] >> for more information, visit the author's website at jeffery frank.com. >> it is very significant that this has been preserved through all of these years. at one point there were probably about 30 or 40 of these around the salt river valley. and only a couple of them have survived. most of them were a third or a quarter of the size. so a lot of those were destroyed. it is often an opportunity to study this, learn about the lifestyle and hopefully learn something about how complex the

social and political organization was. with archaeology, one of the great things that we have is that when we look into the past and see what people did, it gives you hope for the future. because if they can do this in the desert, what is it we can't do? >> booktv in american history tv tour the history and literary life of mesa, arizona. including a look at the great temple mounds built between 1100 and 1400 a.d. april 6 and 7 on c-span2 and 3. >> katie pavlich is an author and the author of "fast and furious: barack obama's bloodiest scandal and the shameless cover-up." can you talk to us about this book?

>> yes, we are in the court system, the questions have to do with the executive privilege that president obama asserted over last june and whether those documents have to be turned over to congress. now, there are still thousands of documents that have been requested that are sitting in the justice department that are not being turned over. the court will decide whether those have to be. that is where we are coming up with a deal. so we are kind of waiting for that brief. mark is a good month to see what will happen or not. >> can you give us a brief overview? >> okay, it is essentially the department of justice using the bureau of alcohol, tobacco, and firearms. they spent 2500 rifles into the

hands of mexicans in mexico, and also those kinds of things here. >> if you want more information on her butt, she was a guest on our "after words" program last year. you can go to the booktv archives and search for katie pavlich or "fast and furious." moving onto your book, just recently, you had made some news that you are 25 years old, and in five years you may be interested in running for john mccain seat in arizona. >> john mccain has hinted that he might retire. i doubt that he will. but the door is always open. i think being from arizona, he has been the only option for a long time.